The networked computing environment (e.g., cloud computing environment) is an enhancement to the predecessor grid environment, whereby multiple grids and other computation resources may be further enhanced by one or more additional abstraction layers (e.g., a cloud layer), thus making disparate devices appear to an end-consumer as a single pool of seamless resources. These resources may include such things as physical or logical computing engines, servers and devices, device memory, and storage devices, among others.
Providers in the networked computing environment often deliver services online via a remote server, which can be accessed via a web service and/or software, such as a web browser. Individual clients can run virtual machines (VMs) that utilize these services and store the data in the networked computing environment. This can allow a single physical server to host and/or run many VMs simultaneously.
To facilitate access by the potentially large number of external clients to the VMs, solutions, such as software-defined networking (SDN), have been developed that virtualize network communications so that one or more hardware devices can be utilized as a gateway. In operation, these hardware devices are not utilized directly in accessing individual VMs, which can allow network connections to be created with multiple VMs through a single gateway device.
In order to perform these tasks, a set of software services referred to as a gateway appliance is often utilized. This gateway appliance sits in the gateway device (e.g., the edge network) and hosts validation services that authenticate and/or authorize end users. Typically, development of these services is done through flows, gateway internal APIs, and less popular programming languages such as XSLT. Once these services are developed, testing of the services prior to installation in production is important to ensure that the gateway appliance functions correctly.